Leandro Leviste has vociferously rejected allegations that he illegally sold the franchise of his solar energy company to the Manny Pangilinan-led Meralco group for personal gain. With a simple truth that dismantles Leviste’s technical denials and corporate distancing, this column exposes the central failure of his clean-energy empire: that permissions were turned into profit, while power delivery collapsed.

Whether or not a franchise was formally sold misses the point entirely. Thousands of megawatts were promised, monetized, and traded long before they were built — leaving consumers to shoulder the cost of delay, with regulators scrambling only after public scrutiny forced action. In a sector where every missed deadline carries a price, we argue that this was not a misunderstanding of law, but a breakdown of accountability — one that reveals how easily infrastructure can be converted into financial exit when enforcement comes too late.

In recent weeks, Batangas 1st District Representative Leandro Legarda Leviste has launched a near-constant media offensive. From prime-time television interviews to radio call-ins, livestreams, and daily social-media posts, the freshman congressman has made himself nearly omnipresent just as his solar companies began facing government penalties. 

The message is consistent: he did not sell a franchise; the company that held it no longer operates; the Meralco group bought a different entity, and the accusations are misguided. The repetition is deliberate. But Vantage Point believes that saturation is not persuasion and that in public life, credibility is not built by airtime but by coherence. The more Leviste speaks, the clearer it becomes that his defense relies on technical fragments rather than a full accounting of what unfolded.

The controversy confronting him was never about whether a franchise document changed hands. It was about whether regulatory permission — granted early, amplified by political proximity, and accumulated across related entities — was transformed into private value before public obligations were fulfilled. 

Framing the issue as a literal sale of a franchise may be convenient, but it sidesteps the deeper concern: how a clean-energy platform was monetized, while delivery lagged far behind. It is that gap — between promise and performance — that no amount of explanation can dissolve.

Where Leviste’s defense falls short

Leviste’s defense revolves around a narrowing strategy. He insists he did not sell a franchise. He emphasizes that Solar Para sa Bayan Corporation (SPBC), the grantee of Republic Act 11357’s 25-year franchise, is now defunct. He notes that SP New Energy Corp. (SPNEC), the listed company acquired by the Meralco group, is legally separate and distinct. Each claim, taken individually, may be accurate. Together, they attempt to convert a systemic failure into a debate over corporate labels.

But infrastructure does not fail on paper. It fails in real time — when megawatts promised in planning models do not arrive, when reserve margins tighten, and when consumers absorb higher costs not through a surcharge but through everyday bills. In regulated industries, outcomes matter more than architecture.

Philippine jurisprudence has long recognized this distinction. Courts have succinctly held that when corporate structures are used to obscure economic reality or defeat public policy, analysis must move beyond form and examine substance. The law does not reward fragmentation when fragmentation exists only to dilute accountability.

A congressional franchise is not a mere document. It is a state-granted economic privilege that confers early access to regulated territory, credibility with investors, and leverage in project development. Its value lies not in whether it is sold, but in what it enables. Once such permission exists, it shapes land acquisition, service-contract origination, and market expectation long before any asset becomes operational.

This is why the argument that SPBC ceased operations in 2022 does not resolve the controversy. Republic Act 11357 was enacted in 2019, during the Rodrigo Duterte administration, at a time when renewable energy access was scarce and regulatory positioning carried enormous value. For several critical years, that franchise existed while land was consolidated, projects mapped, and capacity promised. Corporate dormancy cannot retroactively erase advantages already extracted.

Nor does the insistence that SPNEC is “separate and distinct” from SPBC answer the core question. Courts do not accept separateness as a mantra. They examine whether entities share beneficial ownership, pursue a common commercial objective, and transfer value — tangible or intangible — across corporate lines. When those elements align, formal boundaries lose their force.

Substance over form is not a slogan, but settled law

Philippine jurisprudence has long rejected defenses built purely on corporate compartmentalization. In Kukan International Corp. v. Reyes (G.R. No. 182729, 2010), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that when corporate structures are used to defeat public convenience or shield parties from accountability, courts are duty-bound to look beyond form and examine substance.

The Court’s reasoning is clear: legal separateness cannot be invoked when it becomes an instrument of injustice.

That principle has been reiterated in cases involving public utilities and franchises, where the Court has consistently ruled that state-granted privileges must be interpreted in light of public interest, not private structuring.

Economic reality

A franchise is not merely a statutory document. It is a public concession — and as I’ve earlier explained, an extraordinary permission to operate in a sector where entry is otherwise restricted. In ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. v. Comelec (G.R. No. 133486), the Court emphasized that franchises are imbued with public interest and cannot be treated as ordinary corporate assets divorced from their social function.

That doctrine matters here.

Leviste argues that SPBC, the holder of the Republic Act 11357 grant, ceased operations in 2022 and that the franchise therefore has become irrelevant. But jurisprudence does not evaluate privileges retroactively.

In Republic v. Meralco (G.R. No. 141314), the Court ruled that benefits derived from a franchise during its effective period remain legally and economically relevant even if later circumstances change. You cannot deny the effect of authority simply because it no longer exists at the moment scrutiny begins.

In plain terms: a privilege enjoyed cannot be disowned once it has served its purpose.

Timing is not a footnote, but the case

Republic Act 11357 was enacted in 2019, during the Duterte administration, when Leviste’s mother, Senator Loren Legarda, was a sitting lawmaker. That fact alone proves nothing illegal — but in jurisprudence, timing determines consequence.

From 2019 to 2022, that franchise existed during the formative period of Leviste’s renewable-energy expansion. Land was consolidated. Solar zones were identified. Service contracts multiplied. Market expectations formed. By the time the franchise holder became dormant, the ecosystem it enabled had already taken shape.

Courts have consistently held that corporate restructuring after value creation does not negate accountability for how that value arose. In Concept Builders v. NLRC (G.R. No. 108734), the Supreme Court ruled that when one corporation is used to avoid obligations incurred through another, the veil may be pierced even absent fraud, if public policy is compromised.

That is precisely the issue regulators now confront.

Leviste repeatedly emphasizes that SPNEC, the company sold to Meralco’s renewable unit, is “separate and distinct” from SPBC. But legal separateness is not conclusive. It is evidentiary.

Courts ask whether entities share ownership, control, purpose, and benefit. When these align, separateness becomes fiction.

This is why jurisprudence refers not to corporate form, but to economic unity.

Markets understand this instinctively. Investors did not value SPNEC based on steel already standing in the field. They valued it based on pipeline, permissions, scale, and projected capacity — expectations rooted in regulatory access.

What was monetized was not electricity. It was belief.

Why divestment does not dissolve responsibility

Leviste also argues that penalties imposed by the Department of Energy (DOE) should be directed at SPNEC, now controlled by Meralco, because he has already divested.

That defense fails under long-settled doctrine.

In Cruz v. Dalisay (G.R. No. 146303), the Supreme Court held that liability does not evaporate simply because ownership changes after obligations are incurred. Responsibility attaches at the moment commitments are made, not when consequences arrive.

Infrastructure contracts are not day trades. They bind timelines, public planning, and national security assumptions.

The DOE’s own data shows that nearly 12,000 megawatts of renewable capacity associated with Leviste-linked entities failed to come online as scheduled — roughly 63% of canceled capacity in the 2024-2025 enforcement sweep. Actual delivery hovered near 2%.

From my vantage point, this is not a criminal charge, but more of governance failure. And governance failures in utilities carry consequences far beyond corporate balance sheets.

Why consumers paid long before penalties arrived

Electricity pricing does not wait for investigations to conclude. Grid planning assumes awarded capacity will be delivered. When megawatts do not arrive, the system compensates through higher-cost dispatch and thinner reserves.

There is no surcharge labeled “undelivered solar.” The cost appears structurally — spread across the system.

This is why the DOE itself has estimated that, had canceled renewable contracts been delivered, electricity prices could have been roughly ₱2 per kilowatt-hour lower by 2030. That difference reflects capacity that existed in planning models, but not in reality.

In Tatad v. Secretary of Energy (G.R. No. 124360), the Supreme Court warned that energy policy failures ultimately burden consumers, and that regulatory discretion must be exercised with urgency precisely because delay has economic cost.

That warning now reads less like theory and more like prophecy.

Enforcement after exposure is not reform

What troubles markets most is not that penalties were eventually imposed. It is that enforcement required public pressure to occur.

By October 2025, missed milestones were already evident. Projects were dormant. Deadlines had lapsed. None of this was hidden. Yet the system moved slowly, treating accumulation of nonperformance as administrative friction rather than systemic risk.

It took the Vantage Point exposé to force the question regulators had deferred: how did so much promised power become monetizable before it was ever built? Only then did penalties harden. Only then did accountability accelerate. But jurisprudence is clear: enforcement that arrives after damage is not deterrence — it is admission.

Why this was never about a franchise

Leviste’s defense focuses on what he did not do. He did not sell a franchise. He did not own the company at penalty time. He did not control operations anymore.

But public-utility law does not ask what was not done. It asks what resulted:

• Permissions were granted.
• Capacity was promised.
• Execution failed.
• Value was monetized.
• Consumers absorbed the cost.

No corporate rearrangement changes that sequence.

This column does not allege illegality. It asserts something more fundamental: that Philippine infrastructure governance remains vulnerable when permission is rewarded faster than performance.

Clean energy cannot function as a speculative asset class. It must function as infrastructure.

Until execution — not access, not proximity, not narrative — becomes the currency of credibility, our country will continue repeating the same cycle: promise first, enforcement later, and the public paying in between.

That is why this was never about a franchise. It was about whether the system rewards building — or merely being early enough to sell the idea of it. And that is the true reckoning that Philippine energy policy can no longer postpone. – Rappler.com

Related Vantage Point articles on the Leandro Leviste solar energy business:

• [Vantage Point] The Leviste gambit: Monetizing clean energy for political gains?
• [Vantage Point] The Leviste solar saga – why markets should be worried
• [Vantage Point] Consumers pay for DOE’s delayed action on Leviste firms 

Some recent Vantage Point articles on green energy and sustainable financing:

• [Vantage Point] The truth about net-zero emissions
• [Vantage Point] BPI’s blue bonds: Saving our seas or rebranding an old development gap?
• [Vantage Point] Why the Philippines should slow down on offshore wind transition

Click here for other Vantage Point articles.